He read it twice before he understood, and I watched him do it over the rim of my coffee cup. Sixty days to vacate. A&E Property Holdings, the company that owned the house he had been mailing rent to for eight months, was terminating the month-to-month lease and placing the property for sale. Then he reached the second page, the letter in my own hand, and I saw the exact moment the initials arrived somewhere in the back of his memory, past the complaints about his landlord, past thirty years, to a childhood spent stepping over boxes marked A&E Outdoor Supply. Adelaide and Edmund. His father’s company. His mother’s name. The landlord he had grumbled about at his own dinner table was me.

Brielle reached the bottom of the stairs and asked what was happening, and Callum could not answer her, because the woman he had booked into a studio apartment to free up a bedroom had owned the ground under his family for the better part of a year.